Starborne (32 page)

But today there is an odd and troublesome splashback effect: Noelle, monitoring the circuit, is immediately aware that the signal has failed to reach Yvonne. Yvonne is there, Yvonne is tuned and expectant, yet something is jamming the channel and no
thing gets through, not a single syllable.

“
The interference is worse than ever,”
she tells the year-captain. “
I feel as if I could put my hand out and touch Yvonne. But she
’
s not reading me and nothing
’
s coming back from her.”

With a little shake of
her shoulders Noelle alters the sending fr
e
quency; she feels a corresponding adjustment at Yvonne
’
s end of the connection; but again they are thwarted, again there is total blockage. Her signal is going forth and is being soaked up by
—
what? How can such a
thing happen?

Now she makes a determined effort to boost the output of the system. She addresses herself to the neural center in her spine, exciting its ene
r
gies, using them to drive the next center to a more intense vibrational tone, harnessing that to pu
sh the highest center of all to its greatest ha
r
monic capacity. Up and down the energy bands she roves. Nothing. Nothing. She shivers; she huddles; she is visibly depleted by the strain, pale, struggling for breath. “
I can
’
t get through,”
she murmurs. “
Yvo
nne
’
s there, I can feel her there, I know she
’
s working to read me. But I can
’
t transmit any sort of intelligible coherent message.”

***

A hundred, two hundred, however many light-years from Earth it is that they are, and the only communication channel is
blocked. The year-captain finds himself unexpectedly beleaguered by frosty terrors. They can report nothing to the mother world; they can receive nothing. It should not matter, really, but it does. It matters terribly, somehow. The ship, the self-sufficie
n
t autonomous ship, has become a mere gnat blowing in a hurricane. There is darkness on all sides of them. The vo
y
agers now hurtle blindly onward into the depths of an unknown un
i
verse, alone, alone, alone.

He sits by himself in the control cabin, brooding.
He has failed N
o
elle, he knows, fleeing helplessly from her in the moment of her need, overwhelmed by the immensity of her loss, for it is her loss even more than it is theirs. All about him meaningless readout lights flash and wink. He is dumfounded by t
he depth of the sudden despair that has e
n
gulfed him.

He had been so smug about not needing any link to Earth, but now that the link is gone he shivers and cowers. He barely can recognize himself in this new unraveled man that he has become. Everything has
been made new. There are no rules. Human beings have never been this far from home, and the tenuous, invisible bond between the sisters had been their lifeline, he realizes now, and now the sisters are sundered and that lifeline is gone. It is gone. The
w
ater is wide and their ship is very small. He walks out into the corridor and presses himself against the viewplate; and the famous grayness of the Intermundium just beyond, swirling and eddying, the grayness that had been so beautiful to him and so full
o
f revelations, mocks him now with its unbearable immensity. Mocks and seduces all at once. Leap into me, it calls. Leap, leap, lose yourself in me, drown in me.

Behind him, the sound of soft footsteps. Noelle. She touches his hunched, knotted shoulders. “
I
t
’
s all right,”
she whispers. “
You
’
re ove
r
reacting. Don
’
t make such a tragedy out of it.”
But it is. Her tragedy in particular, hers and Yvonne
’
s. He is amazed that she can even think of giving comfort to him in this moment, when it is he who should be com
forting her. Noelle and Yvonne have spent their lives in the deepest of unions, a union fundamentally incomprehensible to everyone but them, and that is lost to them now. How brave she is, he thinks. How strong in the face of this her great disaster.

But a
lso, he knows, it is his disaster, his tragedy, theirs, everybody
’
s. They are all cut off. Lost forever in a foggy silence. Whatever triumphs they may achieve out here, if ever any triumphs there are to be, they will never be able to share them with the m
o
ther world. Or at least will not be able to share them for a century or more, until the news of their a
c
complishments creeps finally back to Earth on whatever conventional carrier wave they use to send it. None of the fifty who sailed the stars aboard the
Wotan
can hope still to be alive by then.

From the gaming lounge, far down the corridor, comes the sound of singing. Boisterous voices, Elliot, Chang, Leon. They know nothing, yet, of what has happened.

Well, Travelin
’
Dan was a spacefarin
’
man

Who jumped
in the nospace tube
—

The year-captain still has not turned. Something that might have been a sigh or might perhaps have been a sob escapes from Noelle, behind him. He whirls, seizes her, pulls her against him. Feels her trembling. Comforts her, where a mom
ent before she had been comforting him. “
Yes, yes, yes, yes,”
he murmurs. With his arm around her shoulders he swings around, pivoting so that they both are facing the viewplate. As if she could see. Nospace dances and churns a couple of centimeters from
h
is nose, just beyond that transparent shield. That shimmering grayness, that deep infinite well of nothingness, his great Intermundium. It frigh
t
ens him now. He feels a fierce wind blowing out of the viewplate and through the ship, the khamsin, the sirocco
, the simoom, the leveche, a sultry wind, a killing wind coming out of the gray strangeness, all the grim dry deadly winds that rove the Earth bringing fire and madness, hot winds and cold ones, the mistral, the tramontana. No, he thinks. No. He forces hi
m
self not to fear that wind. He tells himself that it is a wind of joy, a cool sweet wind, a wind of life. Why should he think there is a
n
ything to fear in the realm beyond the viewplate? Until today he has a
l
ways loved to stand here and stare into it: how
beautiful it is out there, how ecstatically beautiful, that is what he has always thought! And it is. It is. Noelle is quivering against him as if she sees what he sees, and he begins to grow calm, begins to find beauty in the sight of the nospace realm a
g
ain. How sad, the year-captain thinks, that we can never tell anyone about it, now, except one another.

A strange peace unexpectedly descends on him. He has found once more that zone of calm that he had learned, in his monastery days, the secret of attaini
ng. Everything is going to be all right, he insists. No harm will come of what has happened. And perhaps some good. And perhaps some good. Benefits lurk in the darkest places.

***

Noelle plays
Go
obsessively, beating everyone. She seems to live in the loun
ge twenty hours a day. Sometimes she takes on two opponents at once
—
an incredible feat, considering that she must hold the co
n
stantly changing intricacies of both boards in her memory
—
and defeats them both: two days after losing verbal-level contact with Y
vonne, she simultaneously triumphs over Roy and Heinz before an astounded aud
i
ence of fifteen or twenty of her shipmates. She looks animated and buoyant; they all have been told by now what has happened, but wha
t
ever sorrow she must feel over the snapping
of the link she takes care to conceal. She expresses it, the others suspect, only by her manic
Go
-playing. The year-captain is one of her most frequent adversaries now, taking his turn at the board in the time he would have devoted to composing and dictati
ng the communiques for Earth. He had thought
Go
was over for him years ago, but he too is playing obsessively these days, building walls and the unassailable fortresses known as eyes. There is satisfaction and reassurance in the rhythmic clacking march of
the black and white stones. But Noelle wins every game she plays against him. She covers the board with eyes.

***

The quest for Planet B serves, to a considerable degree, to distract the voyagers from the problems that the disruption of contact with Earth
has created. Expectations quickly begin to rise. Suddenly there is great o
p
timism about Planet B among the members of the expedition. If there are no more cozy messages from home, there is, at least, the counte
r
balancing pleasure of contemplating the possi
bility that a wonderful new Earthlike home lies at the end of this stretch of their voyage.

Hesper has refined his correlation techniques and is able to provide them with a plethora of data of high-order reliability, so he claims, about the world toward wh
ich they go. It is, he says, the second of five planets that surround a medium-sized K-type star. Whether a star of that spectral type can be hot enough to sustain temperatures in the range agreeable for protoplasmic life is something that arouses some de
b
ate aboard ship, but Hesper assures everybody that the star that is their destination is a K of better-than-median luminosity, and that Planet B is close enough to it so that there should be ample warmth, perhaps even a little too much for complete comfor
t.

How can Hesper know all this stuff? No one can figure it out: it is a perpetual mystery aboard the ship. He doesn
’
t have access to direct a
s
tronomical observation of the target system, not out here in nospace; they all are aware that he is simply playing
around with a bunch of cry
p
tic reality-analogs, a set of data-equivalents that he decodes by means of methods that nobody else can comprehend. Still, he was right enough about Planet A, so far as the question of its size, temperature range, a
t
mospheric ma
keup, and other salient points was concerned. Hesper had indeed missed one small detail about Planet A that made it notably u
n
suitable for human settlement, but that was one that no instrument yet devised could have detected in advance of an actual manned
landing.

What Hesper says about Planet B is even more encouraging than his preliminary reports on its unhappy predecessor. Planet B, Hesper a
s
serts, is a planet of goodly size, with a diameter that is something like 15% greater than that of Earth, but it m
ust be made up largely of the lighter elements, because its mass is no bigger than Earth
’
s and its gra
v
itational pull, presumably, is about the same. It definitely has an atmo
s
phere, according to Hesper, and here the news is very good indeed, the good old
oxygen-nitrogen-and-a-smattering-of-CO
2
, mixed pretty much the way human lungs prefer to have it, except that there
’
s a tad more CO
2
than is found on Earth. Possibly a tad more than a tad, in truth
—
a bit of a greenhouse effect, Hesper admits, probably givi
ng rise to a sort of steamy Mesozoic texture for the place. But the Mesozoic on Earth was a life-friendly era, a time of gloriously flourishing fauna and flora, and there should be nothing to worry about, Hesper tells them. Think tropical, he says; and, c
h
ild of the sun-blasted tropics that he is himself, his eyes light up with the thrill of anticipation. All will be well. It will be a planet-sized Hawaii, he indicates. Or a planet-sized Madagascar. Warm, warm, warm, lots of moisture where moisture does th
e
most good, a shining, humid paradise, a sweet lush leafy Eden.

Well, maybe so. Some of the older members of the crew remember that the Mesozoic was the dinosaur era, and they don
’
t see anything pa
r
ticularly enticing about setting up a colony in the midst
of a lot of din
o
saurs. But there isn
’
t any logical necessity to the analogy, which others promptly point out. Evolution doesn
’
t have to follow the same track on every world. High humidity and tropical temperatures from pole to pole and an extra dollop of C
O
2
in the air may have given rise to a dominant race of giant reptiles on Earth, sure, but on Planet B the same circu
m
stances may have brought forth nothing more complex than a tribe of happy jellyfish dreamily adrift in the balmy oceans.